The One-Eyed Man

In this era of so-called “post-truth,” it’s liberating for many of us to vicariously rant, rave and go completely Howard Beale in the relatively safe confines of our own minds.

Clearly, Ron Currie is aware of that fact and it's undoubtedly why he dedicated his dark, tender and oh-so-timely novel, The One-Eyed Man (Viking, 336 pp., ***½ out of four stars), “to my fellow Americans.”

Like millions of Americans today, Currie’s protagonist — a middle-aged man named simply K (think Kafka) — is starting to lose it. Somehow his wife’s death has robbed him of his ability to accept, process and otherwise deal with metaphor. So much so that he becomes an accidental hero and subsequent star of a reality show.

It turns out that K’s need for fact-checks and literal explanations when confronted with empty phrases and lazy, bumper-sticker thinking is infuriating enough to incite violence and give birth to ratings-rich TV.

“I always want to know facts,” says K, though he has no agenda beyond, perhaps, unknowingly sublimating the painful memory of his troubled marriage and his wife’s death. He just wants to know, for starters, exactly why “hand soap” gets a special body-part designation. And when a crossing signal says “Don’t Walk,” he doesn’t, which sets off a chain reaction that takes him down an otherwise inconceivable but wholly believable path.

Author Ron Currie(Photo: Tristan Spinski)

And as he careens, crashes and stumbles his way through what is left of his life, K partners up (on-screen and off) with a smart-mouthed former grocery store clerk named Claire who’s looking for fame and a way out of her life. Together, they tempt fate, test the patience of the most volatile and impatient, and expose the lunatic fringe in politics, society and on TV.

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” said Erasmus. But in Currie’s fictional setting, K, the one-eyed man, doesn’t rule anyone or hold dominion over anything. “I’m just trying to understand,” he says.

It certainly doesn’t end well for K, whose simple observations can break your heart.

When the story approaches what seems to be a cataclysmic conclusion, K takes the measure of TV news and the current state of affairs: “It may be true that there was a time in America when journalists sought clarity of circumstance and certainty of fact,” he says, “but now, as I listened to speculation after speculation, each one more baseless than the last, I realized that the bread and butter of the modern newsman was opacity. When one has an endless succession of 24-hour news cycles to fill, the fewer known facts, the better.”